November 10, 2013
The Other Side of Youth by Kelli Deeth
I think that most of us in our 30s will see ourselves somewhere in Kelli Deeth’s short story collection The Other Side of Youth. For me, it was this passage from “Something Happy”:
“I have your grandmother’s china for you,” her mother said. “She took good care of it.”
“I don’t really have room for it,” Carmen said. She suddenly saw her grandmother’s hands–solid and covered in age spots.
“But you will,” her mother said. Carmen heard a strain in her mother’s voice, but when Carmen looked, her mother was not exactly smiling, but looking up and off at something pleasant only she could see.
It reminds me of a conversation my mother and I have had a million times, and all the grandmothers’ china I don’t have room for in my apartment, never mind that I’ve never had china of my own. And that I’ll probably never own a house ever, which would come with a basement I could put the china in until it came time to pass it on to my own daughter to keep in a box and never use.
This passage also reminds me of the woman in Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” whose husband was born the night the Titanic went down, the woman who told Didion that someday she’d be able to afford a house that code $1000 a month. “Someday you will,” she said lazily. “Someday it all comes.”
And Kelli Deeth’s book is about all the ways that it doesn’t, how those inevitable things like basements, china and having babies can go amiss. The final point in particular, which I thought was this book’s most remarkable feature. Just as we’re lately doing a terrific job exploring the many facets and varying experiences of motherhood, so too does Deeth show that not having children is a land of many stories and different experiences. Her characters are childless by choice or otherwise, ambivalent or despairing, looking toward adopting, desperately trying to hold onto high-risk pregnancies, trying to process the emotional pain and trauma of miscarriage, trying to maintain relationships under such circumstances.
A few of these stories are about young women, gritty stories about innocence lost too soon (and isn’t it always too soon)? In those stories of women in their 30s, on “the other side of youth,” Deeth shows that loss of innocence can be just as devastating, illusions only now being shed about what life gives and takes away.
These are dark stories, and yet there glimmers spots of hope and moments of illumination. Lives in pieces may seem like shards, but there is fascinating texture to so many edges.
November 10, 2013
Someone is always crying somewhere. Usually here.
Everything has been a bit heightened around here lately, busy and outside of ordinary. Stuart was working at a conference at the beginning of last week, and so was away a lot. There has been a flurry of activity to have my book copy-edited by the end of this week (which is very exciting!). I was preparing for the Wild Writers Festival in Waterloo on Saturday, and then we found out on Friday night that my poor dad was going to need emergency surgery. My mom drove Iris and I to Waterloo on Saturday morning and left without enough time, which meant that we arrived just as my event was beginning, GPS dropping us off a block away from where we should have been. I’d been breastfeeding in the car as we zipped down the highway, leaning over the carseat, presenting a curious sight to passing drivers, I am sure. The car stopped and I jumped out without even saying goodbye, dashing across an intersection and with no time to even worry about how my mom was going to contend with Iris, who did indeed scream for the entire 80 minutes I was presenting. Apparently, everybody was quite concerned, not knowing that Iris’s end-of-the-world scream is pretty standard for her. She has taken to letting it rip whenever anybody who isn’t me is holding her. After 7pm, this population includes her father, which is a little bit annoying, and we’re hoping it’s just a phase. I know it’s just a phase. But still. A bit rage-inducing.
Anyway, my Wild Writers event went really well, but between worrying about my dad and Bad Iris, I wasn’t really there. (Read Carrie Snyder’s blog, because she was!) We didn’t stay too long after lunch, and drove back to the city without incident. We were happy to learn that my dad was out of surgery and stable, and while his recovery will be long and difficult, I am glad he’s going to be okay. We’ll be going to see him next weekend, in the midst of (inevitably) last-minute preparations for our trip to England. Yes, Bad Iris on a transatlantic flight. Gulp. Luckily, there will be Grandparents at our destination to receive her. And probably hand her back when she starts screaming…
So yes, there has pretty much always been someone around here having a tantrum lately. I am pleased that this someone has not always been me. While Iris sleeps on me, or doesn’t sleep on me, rather, I have been reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a big fat American-sized book which I’m 500 pages into and not tired of yet. Not a perfect book–I agree with all of Zsuzsi Gartner’s criticisms in her review. And yet, it’s working for me. I enjoyed Jared Bland’s examination of its language in yesterday’s paper.
Also in yesterday’s paper: a story about Harriet’s play school and its role as part of Toronto’s hippie past and the legacy of Rochdale College. And do read “The Wild Thing With People Feet Was My Favourite,” which is an amazing story of the power of picture books and how they shape and reflect our lives. Plus, a Behind the Poem feature from Melanie Dennis Unrau’s Happiness Theads, in which the poet unpacks the strange abbreviations of online mothering forums. And an interview (with recipes for cookies and scones!) by the creators of Alice Eats: A Wonderland Cookbook.
November 7, 2013
On the Unbearable Uselessness of Mother Wisdom
My daughter Harriet is four, and she is a lot like me, except that she’s grown up in the city instead of the suburbs and she goes to the museum once a week. For someone who is four, she has some excellent ideas about where to get the best pastries in our neighbourhood. One day she’ll use chopsticks, but for now, she eats her sushi with a fork.
Which is to say that I am enamoured of her worldliness, and I’d like to think that between the two of us, we have this life thing figured out.
My illusion slips though when I glimpse the parts of her that are just a little too familiar. I observe the awkward ritual of her eating a cupcake. I catch her being unkind to a younger classmate. I see her making all the missteps I’ve spent most of my life learning to avoid.
***
It took me 25 years to learn not to leave dirty dishes piled in the sink. Which sounds like a lesson that’s awfully mundane, but it isn’t. First of all, because it made me the kind of person who doesn’t leave dirty dishes piled in the sink, which is useful. And also because it taught me the pleasures of a chore all done, the loveliness of a small window in my life in which there are no dishes to do. When there’s a job, get it done, is what it took me a quarter of a century to figure out, and this is just one of the things that I know.
I know that cupcakes are most delicious when I don’t lick the cream off first. This is also true of Oreos. I know that making my bed in the morning will improve the experience of going to bed tenfold. I know that I have to be the change I wish to see in the world, and that kindness is a subtle force, but one that’s powerful. That if something’s difficult, it’s all the more reason to try it. That fear is not an exemption from bravery. I even know how to eat an ice cream cone without it dripping down my shirt. Most of the time.
I know that books are the key to the universe. That after every winter comes a spring. That if I try it, I just might like it. That being loud is not the same as being heard. That if I take care of things, they last longer, and if I put them away, I know where to find them. I know that cheap shoes will leave a legacy of ruined feet. And if I’m going to eat a cookie, I better make sure that it’s a good one.
***
Let us imagine a conversation with my daughter. The one where I tell her, “I learned all my lessons so you won’t have to.” And she says, “Thanks, Mom,” my ever-grateful beneficiary. She will always get her homework done before dinner. She takes care of her teeth. She will seek out vulnerable classmates and befriend them. She never ever asks, “Are we there yet?” because she knows that whining doesn’t make a journey go faster, and she was born knowing that boredom is a kind of personality defect.
I am not completely a fool. I know that parents more experienced than I are reading this now and thinking, “Just you wait, lady…” My little daughter is only four and the stakes are cupcakes and whining; this is just the beginning. And it’s what lies ahead that is totally terrifying.
I think of other things I’ve figured out by now. Important things like how not to get hit by busses when crossing the street. How not to get a stupid tattoo. I know how not to get pregnant. I know how not to get so drunk that I’m left unconscious and therefore, in the minds of some, a fair target for rape. I’ve gotten quite good at figuring out how not to get my heart broken. I learned how not to give myself away, how to keep friends, and how to appreciate my own company. I fell in love with a man who knows he is lucky to be loved by me. I can drive a car without crashing. I know how to be secure in myself without having to whittle away at the self-esteem of another. These are lessons, some of them, that have been a long time coming.
**
From exposure to a multitude of terrible cliches, I’ve known all along that part of being a parent is letting our children go, letting them fly, setting them free. It’s a lesson that’s easier to know in theory than in practice, but I still understand it as a necessary component of the mother trade.
And it’s a really romantic idea, at least when you choose not to think about Icarus. Instead, soaring eagles and everything. But what I never understood are the inherent risks of flying, that our children aren’t always going to soar. I didn’t realize that part of being a parent is also giving our children the freedom to plummet back to earth.
So far, being a mother has been one long continuing education, and the greatest revelation has been this: it is unfair to expect my daughter to immediately impart a lesson that I took 25 years to learn. From my daughter’s perspective, all my hard-won mother wisdom is utterly useless. No matter how many times I tell her all the things that I know, she’s still going to have to figure them out for herself.
***
I am watching Harriet in the playground, besotted with the big girls who have no time for her, following them around and seeming not to notice when they don’t respond to her bossy instructions for playing. The girls are playing with Barbies, and now she wants one too, never mind my lectures about their distorted bodies and deformed high-heel feet. Another group of kids is playing soccer, but Harriet doesn’t want to play with them, no matter my feminist imperative that girls can do anything. “I’m not good at running,” she says, which is actually true, because when has an apple ever fallen far from its tree? If Harriet had a sink, her dirty dishes might be piled to the ceiling.
But she is four. This is what I have to remember. What I keep telling myself. It would be a tragedy if she had it all figured out, and it would also make me quite redundant in the role of her mother.
As it is, however, she needs me. Not to have all the answers, but to stay close-by as she makes her own way. It’s my job to give her space, to let her fall, and to help pick up the pieces, if need be.
It’s my job to love her as she is, a work-in-progress just like the rest of us.
This essay was written in August. Mercifully, Harriet has not since mentioned wanting a Barbie.
November 6, 2013
Wild Writers this Saturday
Just a reminder about the Wild Writers Literary Festival this Saturday in Kitchener-Waterloo. Last year, my presentation was about blogging in general, and this year I’m going to get deeper into it with a talk about literary blogs in particular. My new presentation is called “Making the Most of Your Blog: A Guide for Readers and Writers”, and I hope to inspire participants to partake in the art of blogging, to hone the craft and use it to not only become better readers and writers, but also to better “the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work,” to quote Virginia Woolf.
I’m really looking forward to it, and hope to see some of you there. And then after my workshop, there are incredibly events going on all day long featuring some fantastic writers. It is going to be a wonderful day.
November 5, 2013
Margaret Drabble at IFOA
The seed of Margaret Drabble’s 18th novel The Pure Gold Baby was planted years ago during a trip to Zambia, Drabble explained to interviewer Eleanor Wachtel during her appearance at the International Festival of Authors on Saturday afternoon. Zambia, she described as “a beautiful golden country”, and countered that Africa was in fact “the heart of sunlight”. It was impression that stayed with her through decades, though was so apart from the rest of her life that she wasn’t sure how she’d ever use it in her fiction. Even still, the Zambian landscape “became part of the hinterland of my thinking.”
Drabble would return to Zambia years later, “in search of an ending,” she says, for The Pure Gold Baby. Or not an ending exactly, she clarified, but a sense of resolution. The novel isn’t spoiled for knowledge of this Zambian return, which mirrors its introduction, in which anthropologist Jessica Speight observes a group of children playing by the side of a lake, the fingers on their hands fused together in a deformity that resembles lobster claws. The Pure Gold Baby, Drabble says, is not a novel of revelations.
She had seen these same children herself, and was struck by them, by their indifference to their disability, “imperfect children having a perfect time.” Eventually, as her narrator does, and not until years later, she was able to trace her fascination with these children to a childhood friend whose hands had been disfigured after an accident. This connection said something to her about “the mysterious workings of the memory.”
This is vintage Drabble, the broad treatment of history, fascinating with anthropology, autobiographical elements, this story of a young single mother in 1960s’ London. Though underlying the story is that of David Livingston, the famous British missionary to Africa who only ever managed one convert. He was just as successful in his quest to find the true source of the Nile, dying nowhere near where he wanted to be because he was going the wrong way. Drabble was intrigued by his misplaced journeys, this story of life’s alternate directions, of where you end up when you’re going the wrong way, and she wanted his journeys to underlie Jess’s story, though motherhood had put an end to her own actual travels.
This missionary’s story connects too to what Jess refers to as the unfashionability of Christianity during the 1970s. Jess in the novel and Drabble herself considers what system has replaced it. What system makes us behave better toward one another? A question to which neither Jess nor her author have an answer, except that we must strive for a culture that is less cruel.
“I don’t have opinions,” says Drabble. “I have reflections.”
The map has shifted, Drabble says, from the 1960s, from Jess’s time, in that we realize now how much is inherited. There was a focus on nurture instead of nature in that time, she says, which meant more responsibility and more blame (upon mothers in particular). Even in the most benign circumstances, she notes, we try to explain away our inheritances, the family members who note that such-and-such a trait certainly doesn’t come from our side.
There has been a shift too in how we treat those with disabilities, from institutionalized care to community-based solutions. Both options come with their drawbacks, and Drabble acknowledges that there is no perfect solution. There are advantages though, she explains, for having the disabled living among us, and she fears what would happen if a disability like Down Syndrome managed to be eradicated. Those with Down Syndrome show us, she says, a different way of being in the world, a sense of human nature that is without guile.
Wachtel suggested that Drabble was perhaps romanticizing the reality of disability, but Drabble is adamant that she knows such people, she has seen their example, and wouldn’t write about it if it were otherwise. These stories are common really; both in her book and in the interview, she cites examples of writers whose disabled family members were hidden away from the world–Jane Austen, Arthur Miller. And it was the uniqueness of her narrative structure allowed Drabble this bit of latitude in her book, enough distance for some literary gossip.
“And what about Doris Lessing?” Wachtel asks her, who also comes into the story. And at this, Drabble stops talking.
“Doris is still alive,” she says quietly. And so the conversation moves on.
The Pure Gold Baby was originally going to be told in the 3rd person, but instead a common group voice began to emerge. Drabble’s narrator is a chorus figure, but a participatory one rather than the Greek variety. Is her narrator reliable? Wachtel inquires, and Drabble replies that she is (they are) about Jess’s story, though she is curiously evasive about her own life. And any reader has the right to see it differently.
The narrator is Jess’s friend, part of a group of young mothers supporting one another in 1960s’ London. It was the kind of community that Drabble herself was part of at the time, and she remembers organizing a cooperative nursery school when her own kids were small. The attitude of the young moms, she says, was “Let’s help ourselves, because no one else is going to.” It was the era of Dr. Spock, and they all felt children knew best. “We were very permissive,” she says, “but we did like a bit of the evening for ourselves.”
These days, childcare is so much more expensive, motherhood itself has become professionalized. (“In the UK, we have something called Mumsnet,” she says. “I looked at it once and my computer broke down. Everybody was talking about penises.”)
Drabble has written about the 1970s before, but it is different to write about it now than when she was actually living it. Her approach to the time and its characters has become anthropological, she says. “I’m looking at small people in a faraway landscape. Now, it all seems long ago.”
Wachtel noted the Rodin sculpture that makes an appearance in The Pure Gold Baby, and Drabble admits her fascination with aging flesh. “And now we live forever and ever,” she says. “It’s almost unfortunate.” A discussion about death and downsizing leads to a mention of Drabble’s pronouncement in 2006 that she was retiring from fiction. She was wrong it seems, and it was during her previous visit to the IFOA in Toronto that she got the urge to return to fiction.
She says she is grateful for Toronto and the festival for providing space in her life in which her laptop started looking friendly again.
November 3, 2013
The Love Monster by Missy Marston
Her name is Margaret Atwood. Margaret H. Atwood, no relation. She’s the protagonist of Missy Marston’s novel The Love Monster, which recently won the Ottawa Book Award. And her name is Margaret Atwood entirely by accident–her own mother, Rose, had never heard of the literary icon when Margaret H. was christened. There is no meaning to the connection, which is barely even a connection. In this, I suppose, Marston is casting light upon the shadow in which Canadian authors pen their books, putting the name out there because readers are thinking it anyway, or a name that’s something like it. Here is an iconoclast then, this Margaret Atwood, who’s just been left by a cheating husband, has psoriasis, and works in a dreadful office she calls The Button Factory.
And there are aliens. Oh, if anything could be more off-putting, I don’t know. If I’d known there were aliens, I don’t know if I could have picked this novel up, but I am so glad I did pick it up because it delighted me. The aliens (who, like the protagonist’s name) are also not the point, but they are there to add a little magic to a story which otherwise might be altogether too near to reality, too bleak to bear.
“This realization–that every single part of her, no matter what course of action she takes, will get uglier over time, that the process is inevitable and unstoppable–has been crushing.” I didn’t underline this part, because I was too embarrassed to and because I didn’t have to, because I am thirty-four years old and have just had a second baby, and therefore that line is seared on my soul. It sounds vain, I know, but it’s a culmination of things, things that have weighed on poor Margaret H. Atwood who is so memorably bitchy, grumpy, uninterested in making you like her, or anyone. It’s not just about looks, but about how her her life gets lost, and she is adrift in a sea of nothingness (and this part was not seared on my soul, but oh, I can relate about pants too tight). Here we have a story in a setting along the lines of The Office, cringe-worthy encounters, meaningless production, an absence of colour.
We come along with Margaret on her trip to rock-bottom, though the omniscient narrator also embraces Margaret’s mother, her co-workers, even the evil ex, the alien, and invests them with a powerful sympathy, an investigation of the kernel of sadness which lives within us all. The lines, the straight-talk, the music that Margaret plugs into her ears, the disasters–this Canadian book is hilarious, and will never, ever win the Leacock Prize (which is some kind of endorsement). It’s funny, and quirky, but not cute, and it’s terribly profound. Really amazing writing.
Lines like, “Motherhood, the motherfucker above all others: the feeling of always being the lifeguard on duty, of never having a moment’s peace. Counting and counting and counting the precious, vexing little chicks to make sure all are accounted for. Rose believes that, except for that single unspoiled year, sandwiched between her father’s house and her daughter’s birth, that one year lone with her lovely husband, she cannot remember ever feeling at ease. She is always on stand-by. She wants to turn it off, but she can’t. Duty calls. She can feel the motherfucking cape behind her as she rises from the table. Stand tall, mother. Fly!”
And
“But Lou Reed knows everything. If you just listen, it is all there. / He knows that the world can be terrible and that humans struggle to find their way. That’s why they need kicks./ He knows that some kicks can kill you (like heroine[sic*] and brute violence) and others (like love and rock and roll) can save your life. / He knows that sometimes only the tuba can adequately express rock and roll feelings. And he knows how important it is to–how exactly does he out it? Shake your buns.”
*I think “heroine” is a typo, but I’m not sure, and this novel is clever enough, and meta enough that I’d give it the benefit of the doubt. Like the protagonist’s name and the aliens, I can read a whole lot into this. The Love Monster is a novel as heavy on substance as it is on humour, which is rare. I seriously could write a half-decent undergraduate essay on that typo. And I loved reading about Lou Reed, just the day after his death, just another way this novel was like a message from the universe (which all books have kind of read like ever since I finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby).
I liked this novel well enough, thought it was cute, funny, but then eventually, this novel suffused with bleakness begins to bubble over with light and joy and it all comes to mean so much more. SPOILERS!, I guess, but I’m not sure I could convince you to read it otherwise, what with the aliens and the psoriasis. The Love Monster celebrates life and the love, the ties that bind us to the earth and to each other. It is surprising and devourable, challenging tenets of CanLit but affirming the goodness of the world, and I love that. What a revelation–that a wonderful novel can also make you laugh, even make you happy.
